Crazy Loves Company
by Hunter IshamLife can take many crazy twists and turns as it unfolds. Take this review blog for example. A few weeks ago I would never have seen myself sitting down to review films on a regular basis, but I’m hoping that it becomes something that makes my life a richer experience. And so we find Pat Solitano, a newly diagnosed bipolar man who, following a painful separation from his wife, is just released from a mental health facility and into the custody of his parents. Silver Linings Playbook gives us this man and so many other characters whose lives face drastic changes, yet they somehow manage to make something better in the end.
Bradley Cooper, finally given a role with a bit more thematic legroom, plays Pat as an angrily optimistic man who just wants the life he once had, only to be reminded by his loving yet concerned parents (Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro) that his wife has moved away, not to mention that pesky restraining order she has against him. Weaver and De Niro are wonderful as the family that simply wishes for their son to move on and be happy again, even if he wakes them up in the early morning complaining that Hemingway should have given his characters a happier ending. As Pat Sr., De Niro finds a nice middle ground on which he can be both likable and a bit pathetic. As an obsessive compulsive bookmaker who truly cares for his son, he also loves the Philadelphia Eagles, and continually bets his fate on their own.
The Solitano family thinks it’s regularly on the verge of moving forward with their lives, but it’s only with the introduction of the young widow Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) that anyone begins to make progress. Meeting at a dinner put on by relatives and friends, the honest and unfiltered Tiffany strikes up a friendship with the determined yet delusional Pat. They jog together, and after some arm-twisting, he agrees to be her partner in a dance competition. Lawrence gives Tiffany a strength and sense of perseverance and accomplishment, perhaps being the only principal character in the film who, though in stasis following her husband’s death, decides to do something new with her life. She also exemplifies tremendous vulnerability as the film progresses, revealing Tiffany’s true tenderness underneath the grit she displays earlier.
A great talent is needed to bring such humor and heart to a story of gambling, death, and troubled mental health, and writer/director David O. Russell was certainly up to the task. I have not seen his other films, but I am familiar with his reputation for making somewhat crazy material into something compelling. That’s essentially what he does with Silver Linings Playbook, a film that sounds so depressing when put into words yet so charming once viewed from start to finish. Even as the film builds toward the big dance competition, and the audience thinks everyone will have a happily ever after ending, the story bucks the expected trend of a dazzling victory at the competition, instead offering something wholly more satisfying and inline with the film’s tone.
As its title suggests, Silver Linings Playbook is all about people taking what they have, good or bad, and trying to make their lives better for it. The film may give us the ending we want, but it most certainly earns its happiness, never for one second letting us forget the many unhappy endings these characters have endured before the first reel even hits the screen. To look for silver linings in life may be condemned as blind optimism, but with a trend of dark (if still great) films dominating a good deal of cinema right now, it’s great to see something so charming and warm on the silver screen once more. 9/10
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